misc/poetry

12/18/63

The taste of death is sometimes in my mouth, these solitary evenings.

Each day I live means one day less to live.

That’s evident!

Before I die, I’d spend some time with her,

Just living.

Mornings are frantic, like all mornings,

The too fresh mind incapable

Of the maniacal decisions that produce art.

Exhausted by afternoon, I have completed my chores,

And am faced with myself and my hot-self again.

Then I work. I work like a worm in the earth,

I work like a termite fashioning a tunnel, a bridge.

I work for a future I can no longer see.

That’s my life.

Will I in five years, two years, one,

Gnash my teeth again (teeth long ago gnashed to bits)

And curse what I hesitate to call my fate, my pattern?

Or should I call it my stupidity?

Who but an imbecile would have chosen such a hard way?

Or shall I in five years or one,

Grow like an oak dressed in evergreen.

Happiness having swollen in me, become me,

Because of the devotion which she swears?

This I argue with myself on paper.

That is what I feel like sometimes,

Paper.

De Iuventute

When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I
never had time to learn
to savor the pleasures
of it. Fuss and rush
was all it was. And on
to the next.

Now that I'm old and
girls will have none
of me I must try to
imagine what it would
have been like with
each of them if I
had taken some pains
to learn to please them.

Santander Bank was smashed into!
I was getting nowhere with the novel & suddenly the
reader became the book & the book was burning
& you said it was reading
but reading hits you on the head
so it was really burning & the reader was
dead & I was happy for you & I had been
standing there awhile when I got your text
Santander Bank was smashed into!
there were barricades in London
there were riot girls drinking riot rosé
the party melted into the riot melted into the party
like fluid road blocks & gangs & temporary
autonomous zones & everyone & I
& we all stopped reading

DOG POEM

On this day 11 years ago my father died.
I watched him refuse death.
There was no reason to share this.
It was an indignity.
There is no refusing.
The brain stops even if until the last it performs miraculously the
duty of remaining illuminated.
He died on an evening like this warm one in November.
Loose leaves blew around the parking lot as I drove away from the
place of his death, a hospital.
I smoked with my mother's second sister just beyond the gate of the house my parents bought, owned and lived in together for twenty-six years.
I lived in that house, but did not live there then.
We smoked and a reporter came to the gate and asked her
questions.
She was ashamed.
There was no need to answer her.
We did not answer.
We smoked.
The night was strangely warm, like so many peculiar Halloweens,
November in just a few days.
Autumn quiets or casts itself between the warm parts of air.
It fills spaces of warmth with cold.

I think of all the ways
the women in my family have died,

the slow disease of genetics and childbirth
here in the curve of my cheekbone.

The doctor speaks as if this bloodwork
were routine, and I smile to make it false,

make this procedure only a safe precaution.
I’m told to focus on the opposite wall,

on the poster of a record-breaking runner
whose breath I imagine leaving

in heavy strides toward a finish line.
But what I want is to forget

that a body is capable of losing.
The first time I saw the dying,

[...]

AFTER READING “MOCK ORANGE”

Already, it was so:
the scent of orange blossoms
at the window, sun-jostled, bearing

the sting of the finite.
I thought of birds in those branches
as jewels, hard, refracting

light onto our walls, and knew
whatever gleaming they may have done
was not for us.

Knowledge came
disguised in sweetness
and with such ease, it astonished.

We knew, eventually, we would want
different things. Then
we started wanting them.